Overview

The aim of this book is to enable the reader to review data that they may come across in their daily lives e.g., a table of reliability statistics for cars or the statistics of an Ashes tour and be able to evaluate the usefulness and the provenance of the data being provided. Our changing world, especially changes brought about by human activity, necessitates diverse types of data having to be processed continuously to enable us to be aware of how our environment is evolving. Collecting this data is vital to help formulate policies for the efficient functioning of, among other things, the economy, health and social care and other infrastructure elements of an advanced 21st century nation. One of the reasons data such as epidemiological statistics are referenced by any organisation or authority is to justify policies that they are advocating. Knowing a bit about structured information or databases may be helpful when reviewing the data underpinning such policy justifications because well-constructed databases allow users to search substantial amounts of data in an efficient fashion to obtain useful insights. This book is for non-database specialists e.g., students who wish to appreciate some of the factors that must be considered when searching and analysing information presented as tables of data or the visual representations of such data e.g., graphs and charts. Additionally, there will be comments about whether there is any need to probe into the provenance of the data being analysed or reviewed. Please note that this book does have a chapter about the FIFA World Cup tournament, Qatar 2022. I apologise because it is clear that the current Qatari administration has not addressed evidence showing horrific human rights abuses including misogyny, homophobia, and the mistreatment of migrant labour inter alia. Unfortunately, due to the narrative arc of the earlier chapters I have left references to the tournament in. I realise that this prioritises what could be considered an essentially trivial explanation about a data model over the lives of human beings. Sorry. Databases about football competitions including a simple league competition and Qatar 2022, protein sequences and DNA, the UK's electoral system, and the Open Contracting Data Standard are discussed with data models, data tables and a complete worked example provided. Two XML schemas are also provided to allow a comparison of equivalent specifications to those of the data models but can be ignored as they do not introduce any new material. By the end of the book, you should be able to understand how digital databases are designed and constructed using constructs called keys, primary, secondary, and foreign. That ability should enable you to decide if the information you have reviewed in the data tables are well-structured and useful. The discussions about the provenance of the data in the tables should highlight whether you need to investigate further the sources of the data provided.

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